King's College London

Professor Peer Zumbansen, the inaugural Professor of Transnational Law and Founding Director of the Transnational Law Institute (TLI) at The Dickson Poon School of Law, has been named the inaugural Professor of Business Law at McGill University, Faculty of Law, Montreal.

Following a competitive, international search, under the leadership of the late Dean David D. Caron, Professor Zumbansen was appointed as Founding Institute Director and Professor of Transnational Law at King’s in 2014, after more than a decade as Canada Research Chair at Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto.

Originally trained at Frankfurt’s Goethe University, the Université de Paris Nanterre and Harvard Law School, Professor Zumbansen immediately set out to launch the TLI and a number of important new initiatives for the Law School and the College.

Professor Zumbansen introduced a new LLM pathway in Transnational Law for the 2014-2015 academic year, which has repeatedly attracted outstanding international applicants to King’s. In addition, he initiated the launch of the TLI Signature Lecture Series, the TLI “Methods” and “Reading Laboratories”, as well as workshops, conferences and seminars which have provided valuable support to King’s law students, and the launch of the TLI “Think! Paper” series, which disseminates cutting-edge scholarship via the Social Science Research Network (ssrn.com).

In 2015, the TLI launched the annual Transnational Law Summer Institute (TLSI) for advanced PhD scholars and post-doctoral researchers, with subsequent programmes in London and Sydney, Australia. TLSI collaboration grants have been awarded to alumni to support transnational research projects which continue to grow the global TLI community.

In April 2018, following eighteen months of preparation and planning - involving the faculty, fellows, students and alumni - the Institute hosted its biggest flagship event so far, the Transnational Law Summit.

The Summit brought together more than 350 experts in law, economics, politics, ecology, migration and literature, including Nobel Prize laureates, world-renowned scientists, scholars, artists and Foreign Supreme Court Justices. Convened under the theme of “The New Human Condition: Creating Justice for Our Future”, the widely acclaimed event launched a globally inclusive conversation about some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

At the end of 2018, Dr Emily Barritt and Dr Octavio Ferraz joined Peer Zumbansen as TLI Co-Directors, adding invaluable expertise and support to the future endeavours of the Institute. In the eight years since its launch, the TLI has become an internationally recognised hub for graduate education and a lively centre for transnational and comparative research on climate change, corporate governance, migration, modern slavery law and global health policy.

TLI members are highly active researchers, teachers, mentors and institution builders as they connect with peers in both the Global North and South dialogue, collaboration and network building, most recently through international partnerships to track and analyse countries’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: https://lexatlas-c19.org/.

Under the leadership of Dr Barritt and Dr Ferraz, the Institute will continue to grow and expand its global networks. For more information on the Transnational LLM pathway, TLI visitorship and workshops, visit https://www.kcl.ac.uk/tli.